The Holocaust was a horrific event in human history, but why do we need to learn about it when there have been so many other horrible events where people died because of their religion or race? Although there have been other atrocious events, the Holocaust is a modern day example of how hatred and discrimination can hurt so many. People will do things that they wouldn’t normally do when their society says that it is the right thing to do. Also, discrimination against someone because of their race, culture, or religion can cause hatred towards that person, even if it doesn’t start that way. Lastly, when people need someone to blame for their problems they will turn to anything or anyone, even if it isn’t the best thing. These are all things that can and need to be learned from the Holocaust, and they are why we should learn about the Holocaust.
In Germany during the Great Depression, people were poor and jobless just like the rest of the world and they wanted someone to blame. In comes Adolf Hitler, the leader of the National Socialist German Worker’s Party. He came into power because he had someone to blame, the Jews. All the non-Jewish Germans loved having someone to blame for their own misfortunes, so they went along with it. The lesson from this is that you should never blame your own problems on something or somebody else. This led to the discrimination of Jews in Germany.
The discrimination against the Jews in Nazi Germany started out not much worse than the discrimination against blacks in our own country. Jews were not allowed the basic rights that non-Jews had, just like the blacks were not given the same rights as whites in America. The big difference in America’s discrimination against blacks and the German’s discrimination against Jews was that the German’s turned their bigotry into hatred of Jews. They began doing things that most people would never think of doing. They put the Jews into ghettos where food was rationed and there was no work. People began dying by the thousands in these ghettos, but it wasn’t until the Nazis began the death camps that the true example of what hatred can do began. People need to always remember that just because someone is different doesn’t mean that they are a bad person. This hatred and discrimination by the mass majority of the German people made even some of the wisest people go along with it just because everybody else was.
When people get pressured by their friends and society, they will do almost anything. That’s what happened during the Holocaust. People who wouldn’t normally turn on their friends did so because that’s what society told them to do. What people needed to do was go against society and do what they felt was right, but most of them didn’t. The attitudes of people during the Holocaust against Jews resulted from being told to think that way.
A Russian author named Anton Pavlovich Chekhov once said, “Love, friendship, respect, do not unite people as much as a common hatred for something.” This might not sound true, but it is. We need to make it untrue, though. That’s what learning about the Holocaust can do for us. It can make us realize that hatred and discrimination towards something might unite us, but it can do horrendous things. It can also help people understand that society isn’t always right and that we need to think for ourselves and figure out if something is wrong or right. Lastly, it can prevent another Holocaust, where a country blames their problems on a group of different race or religion and then makes that group lower class citizens, or even exterminates them.